The expert view Jon Honeyball

The old adage of “save often, and save in lots of places and formats” really comes home to roost when you look at archival. There are some cheats, though. If you are storing documents in Word format, then having a functional macro that goes through the document store, opening each document, and saving it to text, might be a good idea – even if it’s a least common denominator format. Modern Office documents are relatively safe anyway, because they’re stored as XML (within a ZIP file). However, even if the days of highly proprietary formats are somewhat gone, there are always wrinkles to contend with.

The key question you must ask is “what do I need to access, and do I have to prove it is unchanged?” Gaining access to a file format in 40 years’ time will be possible, but will involve format conversion. Proving the veracity of the document, that it hasn’t been touched or changed, is going to be open to legal challenge when you have to admit that you used some tool to extract the contents. WORM drives can help here, along with long-term archiving to LTO tape. But even that will require careful handling moving forward.

My advice: save in multiple document formats and on multiple storage formats. Then, at least, you have a change of recovering something from one of them, and may be able to demonstrate to a judge that what you have retrieved is a reasonable representation of what was stored.

But I don’t need to tell you this, do I? Any decent archive process is going to have multiple formats, multiple technologies, and multiple locations, if you’re doing this properly.